


something unalterably deranged

by Anonymous



Category: Arcadia
Genre: 14 Valentines, Gen, New Year's Resolutions, Post-Canon, giftfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-07-28
Updated: 2009-07-28
Packaged: 2017-10-02 11:14:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is something unalterably deranged about differential calculus, quantum theory, or the obscene and so inanely liturgical ordeals of the precession of the equinoxes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	something unalterably deranged

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Slinkling](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Slinkling/gifts).



> Written for [slinkling](http://slinkling.livejournal.com) in the New Year's Resolution Challenge 2008. Posted for [14 Valentines](http://community.livejournal.com/14valentines/104974.html).

> "Because children grow up, we think a child's purpose is to grow up. But a child's purpose is to be a child."
> 
> ~ Tom Stoppard, The Coast of Utopia, Shipwreck
> 
> Hannah: She was dead before she had time to be famous.  
> Valentine: She died?  
> Hannah: ...burned to death.  
> Valentine: Oh...the girl who died in the fire.  
> Hannah: The night before her seventeenth birthday.
> 
> ~ Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

He was making a half-hearted attempt at straightening the piles of papers that strewed the table and the piano when Lady Croom appeared at the door. Her body was undeniably solid, blocking the pale autumn sunset from outside, wrapt in a dove-grey late mourning dress, but she seemed somehow fragile, as if the fire had burnt everything essential away, leaving only the human casing for a soul. She looked vaguely about the single room, noting but not truly seeing the disorder, and finally let her gaze rest on him.

"Good evening, my lady," he said. She nodded. "May I assist you?" he asked, a moment later, when she continued to watch him without further gesture.

She stepped further into the room, stumbling over the lintel, catching herself on the jamb of the door. "Oh!" she said, lifting her hand perplexedly. A small fragment of wood had lodged itself in the fleshy part of her thumb, and a drop of blood was welling out. _Carno, carnis_ — feminine, flesh. _Sanguis, sanguem_ — neutrum, blood. He held out his handkerchief.

"My lady," he said. "I do apologise, but a hermit cannot live in luxury."

He pulled the splinter out as gently as he could, and she made no sound, watching him as if he were some fae creature, appeared from the depths of her never-fertile imagination. It was a compromising position, to be holding Lady Croom's hand in the doorway of his hermitage, but he had no choice — she made no move to grasp the handkerchief when he slackened his grip briefly, and he could not deny that it was pleasurable to be once again made forcibly aware of the throbbing nature of the human body. It was almost a shock when she spoke again. "You are not a hermit. You are my daughter's tutor, Mr Hodge." She had lifted her chin, as if anticipating the blow of his next words, and he could not bring himself to inflict them on her.

Besides, they were true. "May I have your ladyship's permission to be both?" he said. She nodded once more, and silence fell like dusk between them. The dwindling light etched her ladyship's face harshly, and he could see the years scored on her skin, which seemed as thin as onion-skin paper. He wondered if he could understand Thomasina's equations better if they were written on her mother's body — the young lecher coming out in him once more; he was almost glad to greet him, it had been so long since he had looked at another body with interest rather than a dull rage — _how dare you be alive when Thomasina is dead?_ — but he could not blame Thomasina's mother for Thomasina's death.

_In sorrow shalt thou bring forth children..._. George, when they had been drunk once, had plucked Septimus's Bible from where it lay and read the words aloud mockingly, his mouth twisting over the words and that marvelous voice of his shaping each syllable like ink off a pen-nib. "Children," he had drawled, flinging the book across the room and onto a chair, "are a thing. Of something wonderful, don't you think, my dear? God's grace visited upon us, innocence walking through our foul land, a joy forever. Or at least until they grow up. To think we were once children, Septimus!"

Septimus had shuddered, where he slumped on the sopha. "Children are little horrors," he had said.

"Such words from a teacher!" George had cried, striking his chest with a clenched fist. "From a man whose work in life is to raise another human soul to the greatest height of which it is capable!"

He had laughed, then, and finished his glass of Madeira. "Shut it, George," he'd said, not bothering to explain that it was hardly a life's work to tutor a wealthier man's son in natural philosophy, especially when that son was near as made no difference to a simpleton. That had been long years ago, and he did not regret his dismissal of the profession then — coming to the Park had been a baptism by rice pudding and water-colours, and he would not have found it so compelling had it been at all expected. No, he did not regret coming to Thomasina jaded, experienced; he only regretted that he had not—

Had not what, precisely? Kissed her, held her, taught her — _told_ her? But he couldn't have; he had not known himself.

He had been introduced to himself the first time he glimpsed his face in a mirror the day after the fire. He had not looked in a glass since.

Whilst he had been sunk in his thoughts, like goldfish in a pond, Lady Croom had begun to move about the hermitage, picking up his calculations and proofs and examining the sheets, covered in scribbles and scrawls and scratchings-out. He knew full well that she would not comprehend the meanings of the equations there, but still his throat closed up for a moment. He could not bear the thought of anyone else examining what had been his alone for the past eight months; his earthly inheritance from a girl who had glimpsed a divine far stranger than ever he had understood. But he could not speak, and when the constriction of his breath had loosened, Lady Croom had lost interest.

She ran her fingers over the dust-covered keys of the piano, not depressing any of the keys sufficiently to make the instrument exhale sound into the cool air. As he watched, he realised that her touch was not casual — she was playing, silently, the same waltz that the Count had played that night. He could very nearly hear once more the pattern of footsteps behind the closed door, smell the single guttering candle at his left hand, and as she turned toward him once more, he ran his tongue across his lower lip to catch the drop of wine he would have taken his oath was there. There was a sharp _pop_ outside, and both she and he startled terribly, although they knew it was the first day of the grouse season.

Somewhere, something fragile and feathered was spending its lifeblood on the ground.

"Oh," she said once more, her gaze drifting over toward the open door. "I should go."

He nodded, unable to speak. She brushed a hand over her skirt, before turning to face him completely, her eyes still opaque. "I shall," she said, "expect you to remain here until my daughter's education is complete. It should be a world of bother to find a more suitable tutor, and it would not be the act of a gentleman to inflict such distress on me. I expect you will be a gentleman, and to ensure it, I expect to call upon you at my pleasure."

He was bewildered only for a moment, and then understanding fell upon him like a thunderbolt (_si quoties homines peccant sua fulmina mittat Jupiter, exiguo tempore inermis erit_) and he could only bow his head. "I am at your ladyship's disposal," he murmured, drawing breath into his lungs; the air was as cool as it had been moments before, but felt fresher somehow.

"I do not think," Lady Croom said, "that I shall dispose of you. I do not think that you are to be discarded in the coming — years." Her voice cracked on the last word, and he reached out a hand, helplessly. He could not breach the space between them, but when she stepped closer, his fingertips brushed against the skin at her wrist. There was no archness in her face, only distress, and he did not know how to ease it; he might wish to, but grief was far more a foreign country than the Corsica George had sailed to, even with its brigands and blasted trees. Grief was a mythical country, and it resembled the park, an English Arcadia — _et in Arcadia ego_.

He would not leave Arcadia; he would not leave the divinely ordered world of good English mathematics where something of Thomasina might still reside, if he could but seek it out, no matter how it wounded him to encounter it. Apocalypse was inevitable, he had known that since childhood, when it had been preached by some travelling minister, but to have such a vibrant girl show him, in precise equations and graphs, how exactly the universe would dissolve, like jam into rice pudding, like a body into ash, felt more like grace than grief. A sudden spurt of gladness in his chest startled him, and his fingers tightened on her ladyship's wrist. "Thank you," he said, and she smiled, brilliantly, as if his gratitude had sparked some flush of life in her that had been coated in smoke since Thomasina's deathday. "I shall anticipate your ladyship's calls eagerly," he said, and was barely surprised to find it was true.

"Of course you shall," she said, lifting her head, as if his words were no more than her due; which, of course, they were. He was pleased, nevertheless, to see her more collected than she had been when she had come to him; perhaps his mourning, stamped on his face, he had no doubt, had given her comfort.

The vista from his doorstep, as he watched Lady Croom walk toward the house, sunset wrapt around her like a shawl, was still unfamiliar. He still expected to look up from his work and see the clean line of the horizon behind the woods, straight-limned figures loping back toward the kitchens with dead rabbits in hand, but instead the land had been plunged into turmoil, as if the bewilderment of all the residents of the estate had been made wood and soil. But today, for the first time, the countryside did not look despoiled, battered, raped — merely jagged and odd. He could grow used to it. He would never like it, but he could learn, as he had learned so many things, to tolerate it, to live amongst it.


End file.
